Centering Women in India’s Coal Belt Energy Transition

It is the architecture of how India's energy transition is being negotiated, and it tells us precisely who is expected to absorb the cost of restructuring while being locked out of the planning room.

The Math of Managed Dependency

Coal still generates more than 70 percent of India's electricity. The Central Electricity Authority projects that coal's share of installed capacity could fall from around 47 percent this year to roughly 33 percent by 2029–30, yet it will still account for approximately 54 percent of electricity generation because baseload demand cannot be met otherwise. And as ORF Online reports, disruptions in liquefied natural gas supplies tied to the Middle East conflict are now pushing India back toward coal-fired power, exposing the much-vaunted "transition" for what it is in practice: a managed dependency on the dirtiest available fuel.

The Geography of Extraction

The costs of this dependency are not distributed evenly. Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha together account for nearly 65 percent of India's coal production and approximately 73 percent of its geological coal resources. For households across this eastern belt, coal is not merely an energy source; it is employment, local revenue, and the scaffolding of regional economies. When structural adjustment arrives—and it is arriving now—those households absorb the shock first.

Who Carries the Restructuring

Women's labor in this belt is concentrated in coal sorting, head loading, and ancillary processing—work that is overwhelmingly informal, unregulated, and structurally invisible to policymakers. ORF Online documents that periods of mine contraction or closure lead to job losses and intensified economic stress, conditions frequently associated with higher alcoholism among male workers and increased domestic violence, compounding women's material insecurity rather than alleviating it. Layer in the environmental degradation that comes with extraction—contaminated water, degraded land, respiratory illness—and the gendered calculus becomes inescapable.

These are not natural consequences of progress. They are policy outcomes, produced by decisions made in air-conditioned ministries and corporate boardrooms, none of which have meaningfully integrated gender analysis into transition planning. The "gradual system restructuring" being celebrated as pragmatic energy policy is, for millions of women in the coal belt, a slow compounding of risk with no compensatory floor beneath them.

We know what gender-responsive transition planning would require: representation in planning bodies, formal recognition of informal labor, targeted social protection during mine contraction, and investment in economic diversification designed with—not just for—the women whose livelihoods are bound to coal. None of this is being delivered at scale. Until it is, the language of "just transition" will continue to function as what it has always been: a branding exercise draped over extraction.